Low-code and no-code tools aren’t ‘cheating’ , They’re leverage.

Low-code and no-code tools suffered from a sort of stigma in the developer community – if it didn’t start from scratch, it doesn’t count. I know where this is coming from. Learning to program was hard for many of us, we have to go through the basics and there is satisfaction in knowing the inner workings of the car. But pride can become gatekeeping, and gatekeeping makes it hard to get things done that are important.

In fact, the old engineer’s mantra of “use the right tool for the job” is something that has always been done. Nobody ever asks a backend developer if he doesn’t want to use a framework in preference to writing all the server code from scratch, or a frontend developer if he didn’t want to use a component library instead of writing all the UI elements from scratch. Low code and no code are just another level of abstraction. They allow you to progress quicker on parts that don’t require custom engineering and thus allow your time and skill to be spent where it is most needed.

It’s even more important for startups, solo builders and small teams. There’s nothing worse than an idea being proven right than it being proven wrong  so getting to market quickly can mean the world of difference. There’s a difference between a landing page created using a no-code tool, a workflow that required no coding, and an MVP that was made up of existing platforms, and that difference is strategic. It’s the developers who know when to build something new and when to use an existing tool that tend to ship their products quicker and use less time re-inventing solved problems.

Skill is not just about coding  it’s about how much code you can write. Measuring by how well you solve the problem in front of you. Sometimes it means writing a computer program from scratch. It can be the ability to know the exact tool that will yield the same results in a fraction of the time.